Grace Design Model 201
A two-channel slice of the flagship Model 801. Phantom power, phase flip, and a 20 dB pad on each channel, in a box that reviewers kept describing as "quiet."
Overview
The Model 201 is Grace Design's two-channel microphone preamplifier. The company's own literature is blunt about where it comes from: it's a two-channel version of the acclaimed Model 801, the eight-channel flagship that built the brand's reputation, as Grace's own ads described it in EQ (July 2000, p.61). The 801 is the box Grace's advertising kept calling "the original and final word in 8 channel microphone preamplifiers." The 201 takes the same circuit philosophy and cuts it down to a pair of channels for people who don't need eight.
What's in the box is straightforward and well documented in the period press. Each channel carries phantom power, phase reversal, and a 20 dB attenuator. The gain controls are 24-position gold-contact switches rather than continuous pots, and each channel pairs that stepped gain with a 10 dB output attenuator knob. A detented, repeatable gain switch plus a separate output trim tells you who this preamp was built for. Engineers who need to match two channels exactly, or return to a setting days later, get repeatability instead of a pot that drifts.
The stated design goal, again from Grace's own material as reported in EQ, is to deliver clarity, subtlety, and detail to tape or hard disk "with no coloration." That's the claim, and the review press spent the most ink on it. EQ's Mitch Gallagher, reviewing the 201 in the April 2002 issue (p.102), framed the whole proposition around front-end quality. A great microphone is only half the equation and needs an equally clean preamp behind it.
The reception was unusually consistent for a piece of pro audio gear. Tom Jung, writing in Pro Audio Review, called the Grace "about as natural as anything I've heard, and quiet," and said the playback revealed a level of ambient detail he hadn't experienced before. Grace reprinted that quote across multiple ad runs in EQ through 2000. Tim Goodyer in Studio Sound put it more directly: once signal was flowing, the 201 "declares its worth," with a sound that's "pleasingly open and uncolored." Gary Barlough and Richard Weibel, writing in Mix, claimed the Grace preamps beat the magazine's most costly tube preamps in a blindfold test. That's a striking result for a solid-state design, and the kind of claim that only gets reprinted in advertising because it stings a little.
Some of this is marketing, not measurement. George Petersen's Mix line, that the 801 "sounds great, is built like a Porsche and is priced right," is about the eight-channel flagship, not the 201. Grace's ads ran it alongside the 201 copy anyway. The 201-specific praise is the Jung and Goodyer material.
On paper the frequency response claim is the eye-catcher. EQ's reproduction of the manufacturer specifications (April 2002, p.104) lists 20 Hz to 300 kHz at 40 dB gain, ±0.2 dB, with a lower figure extending to 4.5 Hz. That bandwidth is far beyond anything the audio band requires. It's really a statement about the circuit's headroom and stability, not a promise you'll hear 300 kHz.
The Model 201 is a working tool from a small Boulder, Colorado outfit that spent its first decade building a reputation one preamp at a time. It's not a collector's trophy the way a tube compressor might be. It's the clean front end a serious recordist bought because the alternative was coloration they didn't want. Whether it still performs that way decades on depends on condition, and any unit of this vintage needs a look before it goes in front of a microphone.
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